Homefield Advantage In Football
Homefield advantage can have a huge impact on the spread in football games. As a bettor, trying to figure out how much influence home field advantage will have on the game should be a key element in your handicapping method. Below we will go over home field advantage in the NFL and college football.
In the NFL, most stadiums hold on average about 45,000 fans. The fans are usually mostly rooting for the home team, except when two teams who are relatively close in distance play. This is a factor that you should consider if you plan on giving a lot of importance to home field advantage.
If Cleveland and Pittsburgh are playing, there will be more Pittsburgh fans at a Cleveland game, than if say Cleveland and Miami were playing. In the NFL, the fans are usually not as loud as college football fans due to the number of fans and due to less loyalty between the fans and the team.
Geography should also play an important role in home field advantage. If the home team is the Houston Texans in January, they won't have the same advantage over someone that the Green Bay Packers would playing in freezing cold Wisconsin.
On average in the NFL, I like to credit about 3 points of the spread to home field advantage.
In college football, home field advantage plays more of a significant role than in the NFL. In many college football stadiums, the attendance at each game can be between 50,000 and 100,000 people! The crowds at college football games can also be much more intense than in the NFL.
Some of the stadiums that I consider the hardest to play in because of noise and volume of people would be Ohio State, Michigan, LSU(specifically at night) and Syracuse.
When handicapping a college football game, you should always consider the effect that these stadiums have on the game. Also a key thing to remember is teams that are in major conferences generally have more of a homefield advantage than teams in smaller conferences, such as the MAC and WAC.
The next time you start to handicap the football schedule for the upcoming week, make sure you weigh the importance of home field advantage into your analysis.
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